The approach I take in my work is to use pop imagery from mass culture – TV shows, professional wrestling, sumo wrestling, and bathing beauties, a well as personal snap-shots. For this series of paintings I drew on imagery from my past religious experiece and from art history – especially angel imagery from the High Renaissance and Baroque periods. I have combined these images in a “traditional” surrealistic style by juxtaposing them in confrontational compositions that have a fantasy or dream quality. These images relate in a way that are not easy to describe but are mostly felt demanding a reaction from the viewer. I wanted to involve the viewer either in personal images of people and their guardian angels or in the generic spiritual world. I have tried to show two levels of reality, one seen, one unseen – both operating simultaneously. There is sometimes a bit of humor or satire in these combinations.

I like the connection or lack of connection in some of the paintings, between the spiritual and physical plane. This relationship between the two planes became a provocative and painful question for me at the time of my father’s death four years ago and in part provided the stimulus for this body of work. I hope that each of these paintings provokes an imaginative story intuitively reached by the viewer who is attracted to and involved in the story and its mystery.

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